Avision AD230 Document Scanner

The Avision AD230 Document Scanner is a compact desktop scanner that can scan up to 40 pages a minute in 200dpi colour.

This scanner comes with a host of features and software to help meet nearly every office's scanning functions.  It can hold up to 80 pages of paper at a time and can support up to US legal paper size.

The scanner can send your scans to your computer in JPEG or PDF format, both in colour or black and white.  While also having the ability to scan to email or scan directly to a printer.

I used this scanner in order to send some documents over to my work and the quality and ease of doing so was very good.  The quality of the scans were very acceptable as well.

Using the scanner in my small office at home was very good as it didn't seem to over heat my room, cause any additional noise when in standby or was overly loud when in use.  It also folded up neatly when not in use so wasn't a burden to have on my desk.

With the scanner you get some software to use, PaperPort SE14 and Avision Button Manager V2 that helped to give you the functionality described above.  The software is easy to install, friendly to use without having to read a manual and does with it says on the tin.

If your looking for a robust desktop scanner then this could easily do the job for you.   It is currently available from Amazon UK priced at £299

Avision MiWand 2 Wi-Fi Scanner Review

The Avision MiWand 2 Wi-Fi scanner is a hand held scanner that can help you experience the power of a scanner while on the move.  The scanner weights around 250g so is lightweight enough to carry around while on the move without it becoming cumbersome.

This portable scanner can provide scanning at a 1200dpi resolution in 24-bit true colour, whilst saving the images as either a JPEG or PDF to the micro SD card (the scanner ships with a complimentary card).

Coming with a rechargable battery, is cost effective in that department.  It also has a small 1.8 inch LCD display built in which can provide a small preview of what you've scanned.   Given the screen size it can help you determine if your scan has been lined up correctly but cannot help you determine any further detail.

The scanning process is fairly straight forward, after pressing the scan button you just need to start rolling the scan over your document.  I did notice that even though the auto-crop function was enabled the device didn't crop off any of the excess edges so I had to edit the JPEG afterwards on my laptop.

Transferring your scans from the MiWand to your laptop or similar device can be done via the inbuilt Wi-Fi.  Turning the Wi-Fi on the device turns it into a hotspot that you can connect to via the wireless on from your tablet/laptop/etc.  Once you connect your default browser will automatically launch providing you with a website of the scans where you can download a copy.     In order to do this you do need to disconnect from your home/office Wi-Fi connection and then reconnect once you have a copy of the scan so it can be slightly cumbersome, however it a good feature to have if you do not have a micro SD reader available.

As someone that travels quite a bit for work to various office the MiWand will come in handy when I have to scan a copy of my receipts to claim on the work expenses or need to scan documents to send/keep a copy of quickly and easily. So for mobile workers this device would definitely come in handy.

You can purchase a Avision MiWand2L A4 Avision Mobile Hand Scanner - Silver from Amazon UK at the moment for £70.29.

Retention Policy Powershell Commands

I've recently been working on applying retention policies to mailboxes and we've been doing a granular roll-out to the users.  I've been using some Powershell commands to track who has the policy applied and who hasn't.

The following command will list all users who have a retention policy applied to their mailbox:

Get-Mailbox -filter 'RetentionPolicy -like "*"' | Select-Object Name, RetentionPolicy

You can export that to a CSV if need be by using:

 Get-Mailbox -filter 'RetentionPolicy -like "*"' | Select-Object Name, RetentionPolicy | Export-CSV C:\directory\file.csv

To identify which users don't have a retention policy applied to their mailbox the following command will assist:

Get-Mailbox -filter 'RetentionPolicy -eq $null' | Select-Object Name, RetentionPolicy

Again to export that to CSV you would use:

Get-Mailbox -filter 'RetentionPolicy -eq $null' | Select-Object Name, RetentionPolicy | Export-CSV C:\Directory\file.csv